Jorick van Weelie
Marketing Lead at DataNorth | AI Enthusiast & Tech Storyteller
Articles written by Jorick van Weelie
What it costs to keep an AI system running after
Running an AI system costs four things: cloud and model usage, maintenance hours, ownership and coordination, and retraining where a trained model is involved. Infrastructure is routinely overestimated and maintenance
Dutch AI factory picks Zernike in Groningen
On 21 September 2026 SURF announced that the Dutch AI factory's supercomputer will be housed at Eurofiber's datacenter campus on the Zernike Campus in Groningen. The machine holds about 1,800
xAI adds Grok Voice Transcribe 2.0
xAI has added Grok Voice Transcribe 2.0 to its batch and streaming speech-to-text API while keeping version 1.0 as the default. Published list prices remain $0.10 per hour for REST
Alibaba Qwen3.8 adds 1M-context Omni analysis and 60-language live translation
Alibaba Cloud has added two Qwen3.8 multimodal endpoints. Omni-Flash combines a 1M context window with audio, video, reasoning and tools, while LiveTranslate targets real-time multilingual translation with speech output.
PrismML releases Ternary Bonsai 2 27B
On 17 September 2026 PrismML released Ternary Bonsai 2 27B, a version of Alibaba's Qwen3.8 27B. The model shrinks from 54 GB to 5.9 GB and keeps 98.2 percent of
Deepgram released Nova-3 Pharma
Deepgram's Nova-3 Pharma is a specialist speech-to-text model for drug names and pharmaceutical vocabulary. It works in batch and streaming through the hosted API and can be requested for self-hosting.
NVIDIA releases DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-NVFP4
NVIDIA published DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-NVFP4 on 16 September 2026, a four-bit conversion of DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash for Blackwell GPUs. It runs on four GB300 GPUs under MIT licence, supports 1 million tokens of context,
Creatify launches Boreal video model
Creatify Labs' Boreal turns LTX-2.5 into an advertising-focused video model priced from one cent per generated second at 720p. That economics can materially increase creative iteration, although the launch benchmark
Salesforce launches Koa, a CRM reasoning model
Salesforce and NVIDIA announced Koa on 15 September 2026, Salesforce's first CRM reasoning model for Agentforce. Koa is a post-trained NVIDIA Nemotron-3-Super-120B and scores 69.41 on Tau2Bench, ahead of GPT-4.1
From Proof of Concept to Production: What actually has to
Between a working proof of concept and a production system, the model barely changes. What gets added is exception handling, a human review step, acceptance criteria, monitoring, access control, a
ElevenLabs opens 50+ models to ChatGPT, Claude and Cursor
ElevenLabs has expanded its hosted MCP into a creative model gateway for ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor and other assistants. One OAuth connection can now generate voice, transcripts, dubbing, music, sound effects,
Sakana AI launches Fugu Max and Fugu Ultra v2
Sakana AI released Fugu Max and Fugu Ultra v2 on 11 September 2026. Fugu Max costs $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens, which Sakana says
How to score an AI use case before you invest
Score every AI use case on two axes, value and complexity, using a deliberately narrow 1 to 3 scale. High value with low complexity gets built, everything else waits with
OpenBMB releases MiniCPM5-2B
OpenBMB released MiniCPM5-2B on 7 September 2026, an open model with 2.52 billion parameters under Apache 2.0. With a context window of 131,072 tokens.
Tencent releases EVIE-8B and EVIE-4.5B
Tencent released EVIE-8B and EVIE-4.5B on 7 September 2026. Apache 2.0 document retrievers scoring 66.75 on ViDoRe V3, with a 3.81 GiB index option.
OpenEvidence launches four medical AI models
OpenEvidence released Osler, Sackett, Snow and Darwin on 3 September 2026. Darwin is the first AI to score 100% on MedQA and is application only.
Google Launches WeatherNext 3 and Lyria 3.5
Google WeatherNext 3 moves global forecasting to hourly updates with key surface variables at 5 km and direct cloud-data access. The operational model is not open source, and BigQuery access
Microsoft Released MAI-Transcribe-2
MAI-Transcribe-2 pairs a 2.0% independent AA-WER score with roughly 410x real-time processing and a promotional $0.10 per audio hour. Built-in diarization, timestamps and keyword biasing make it a serious option
OpenAI launches GPT-6 Astra
OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra on 3 September 2026 at $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens. The model operates software through screens rather than APIs. It
Meta launches Muse Spark 1.3
Meta has released Muse Spark 1.3 through Muse Code and the Meta Model API. The checkpoint targets longer agentic and coding tasks, while open weights remain a future item. Teams
